Goal Setting Fundamentals for Achieving Your Goals

Want direction, energy, motivation and consistent progress? An effective goal setting process can massively enhance your ability to get fired up, enjoy what you do and consistently move forward and achieve more.

Goal Setting Fundamentals

Stop for just a moment and imagine having a tool that consistently takes your goals from being an idea inside your head and transforms them into a reality in the outside world!

That's exactly what an effective goal setting process is.

Here are the key steps of an effective goal setting process:

1. Pick Your Goals:

When coming up with ideas for goals, most people limit themselves to what they think are practical and realistic goals. And that's good. You should have practical and realistic goals.

And at the same time, if you limit yourself to what most people do, then your best achievements are likely to be... ermm... average!

If you want to achieve more than average, a mix of both big and small goals works best:

  • Really big, reach for the sky, long term goals
  • Short-term, realistic, practical goals

So come up with and maintain a list of big and small goals. 

Achieving your goals

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2. Refine Your Goal:

Good. Now let’s pick a goal and refine it. Making goals SMART is a simple way to increase the probability of achieving your goal. The extended SMART criteria I teach make it virtually bullet proof, but even the basic SMART criteria are a great start. That's what we'll cover here:

  • S – Specific – Add as much detail as you can of what you really want.
  • M – Measurable – How will you know when you have achieved it?
  • A – Achievable – Is it? Has anyone else achieved this before?
  • R – Realistic – Is it realistic for you to achieve this?
  • T – Timed – Date when you will have achieved it?

Write down how you goal meets each of these criteria.

3. Install Your Goal

What do I mean by this? A well installed goal is a bit like having your very own motivational speaker installed as an app. His job is to monitor your environment, pointing out opportunities to make progress towards your goals and encourage you to take action! 

A well installed goal will literally change what you notice and pay attention to. The encouragement comes in the form of a burst of motivation prompting you to take action when the opportunity arises to progress towards achieving your goal. Woo gimme that!

This means your action becomes instinctive, rather than forced. When action is instinctive, it's like a habit. Ask anyone who’s had an unwanted habit like nail biting. They’ll tell you that the issue is that it’s difficult NOT to take action! That's the power of habit.

Imagine having a habit of achieving your goals! Now that's a really good habit. 

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4. Overcome Obstacles and Setbacks

Whenever you decide you want something, you open the possibility of getting it. You also open the possibility of obstacles standing in the way of you achieving it.

These might be external obstacles, such as things you need to do first as part of the sequence of achieving your goal, it could be other people standing in your way, or your own internal limitations, conflicts, negative feelings & reference experiences.

Any obstacle can only be an obstacle if you don’t have the resources needed to eliminate it.

If you know what the obstacle is, you can make a plan (and set the goal) to get the resources needed to overcome it. Resources can be external (e.g. money, people, etc) or internal resources (confidence, focus, creativity, motivation, self-belief, etc)

How Big Can You Go?

Over the next year the size of your achievements will largely be determined by:

  • How many goals you set
  • The effectiveness of your goal setting process
  • Your resourcefulness
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    Your ability to bounce back from setbacks such as disappointments, failures and injuries.

The good news is that each of these factors can be improved to maximise your achievements over the next year. 

Download the ebook The 7 Golden Rules of Peak Performance for more. You can access it at the bottom of the page.

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